A long-term complex intervention to move to an aligned Curriculum offer and a shared Learning and Teaching model.

Same destination, different maps

They say if you want to travel quickly go alone and if you want travel far, go together. What complicates any shared travel is starting from different places, using different maps and heading to different destinations. This is our Learning and Teaching journey. 

Travelling quickly or travelling together 

Important as a Mat that we take everyone with us. The Mat Advisor, an enormously talented person, used her phenomenal interpersonal skills to engage all those who needed to be involved. 

Curriculum Entitlement – start with KASE

Early on we wrestled with and agreed an entitlement curriculum built around Knowledge, Attributes, Skills and Experiences. This was largely generic with a commitment that Subject Specialists would interpret for their own domains.

The Subject Specialist’s journey

Subject Specialist groups came together from across the MAT and looked at the sequencing of the Curriculum. Easy in theory but not when there’s already significant investment in topics which are well cherished and understandably difficult to abandon. The Mat Advisor got everyone to a point of agreement. 

Remodelling Learning

If you’ve built your own shelves you may understand what is sometimes called the IKEA Effect. A form of Confirmation Bias where we favour our own creations. That the dilemma we ran up against in trying to agree a whole MAT approach to Learning. Not so much on principles. We could agree broad principles of learning. For an informed group there’s not so much of controversy there. The challenge was the classroom delivery model. Some schools had already invested heavily in a model which had begun to look outdated. 

Nudging best practice 

The Nudge Unit, once again, came to the rescue. The Nudge Unit was set up by Government to use the psychology of consumer behaviours and choice to influence decision-making, particularly around lifestyle choices. Telling people, they are wrong doesn’t work. Giving choice, even if those choices are manipulated, does work. So, in looking at learning models we were able to use some pre-loaded comparisons to draw out and eventually get the model we needed. Some of the slides we used are shown in the resources section.